Community and social computing

Crave has a story from Demo 07 on a new invention by a startup called Zink, with Polaroid's help, is making it much easier to print photos without a large inkjet, thermal, laser, or other ink-based printing mechanisms. Think of it as a new millennium version of the old Polaroid paper. The paper itself is a polymer that has multiple color layers that are heated by a print head to create the actual colors. Here are more details from Zink. This means that rather than a separate printer from your digital camera, you could actually integrate it right into the camera, as well as other devices such as laptops, UMPCs, iPods, etc. Purely brainstorming, you could even integrate it into home electronics equipment like your TV -- there has been at least one attempt at integrating an inkjet into a TV before -- even your fridge (for that list of stuff to get from the grocery store). The limiting factor is having enough space to store the size and quantity of photo paper in the device.

(courtesy: Zink, Crave blog)

Of course, this is a different business model than what HP and other companies have. Most printer companies focus on the financial side of selling ink cartridge's rather than the printer itself to make the most money. So printers have become relatively cheaper with technology and ink much more expensive. Here the model still exists but the paper itself may be the profit margin. Zink suggests 100 sheets for US$19.95. I can't tell who makes the paper but I can guess that Polaroid might just get a new lease on life here.

The question remains if you still have to wave it around in the air for 15 minutes before you can see something visible on the paper.

The books just don't stop coming. I've found three more titles that may be worth reading in relation to online communities and the evolving notions around them: The Starfish and the Spider, Wikinomics, and The Wealth of Networks. (See my amazon list for link info).

The first book focuses more on the ideas of spreading organizational behavior from a top-down model to a non-centric or peer-networked model. This sounds like an interesting idea for organizations with many peers doing similar jobs (e.g., consulting), but I have yet to read it to understand how it works on a large scale operation.

Wikinomic's from Don Tapscott is likely a must read for me to learn more from this semi-socialogical study of wiki behavior.

The Wealth of Networks was on the list of best books of 2006 from the magazine Strategy+Business, alongside other books like The Long Tail (also on my amazon list). It takes a macroscopic look at peer-networking inside and outside organizations, and the impact of those relationships on a business.

I've finally had a chance to look at Many Eyes, a new project from the CUE lab in IBM. The service itself is running and you can try out the application on alphaWorks Services. Think of it as a charting and data visualization tool, similar conceptually to the chart tool in Excel, but much richer and available as an online application. The types of visualizations include: World & US maps, Line graphs, Stack graphs, Bar charts, Block histograms, Bubble charts, Scatterplot, Network diagrams, Pie chart, Treemaps, and more.

The Network diagrams example below is conceptually similar to CNet's The Big Picture portlet (provided by Liveplasma) on this example page. You create a spreadsheet of names or topics and list the relationshps between each entry, typically in a big matrix. CNet also does Treemaps under What's Hot.

I posted an example of a network diagram from Many Eyes below. This is only a thumbnail to go to the actual tool itself, but its a start. I really wish I could embed the actual applet in here somehow.

As I read a part of Brafman and Beckstrom's The Starfish and the Spider, it struck me how similar some of its ideas are to Douglas Atkin's The Culting of Brands (see my list of Books on Communities). I'm going to have to cross reference some of this again later but both describe at least one common element necessary for building successful peer networks (starfish), or brands (culting of brands): ideology.

Brafman & Beckstrom's book talks about having a shared ideology amongst the members of the peer network. This could mean several things from having a core sense of values to a shared sense of purpose to a shared direction (each different things). However, they do not point out the specifics like Atkin's does:

How do you motivate people towards this ideology?

Showing the love, as they say

A statement of value

Shared iconography and symbolism

It's not hard to see why they don't because in a pure-play peer network there is no centralization that develops these ideas. They are amongst one of those nebulous things like asking someone why they like Harley's, swordfighting, anime, open source software, Apple Inc., etc., aside from technical details. Loyalty is an implicit and hard to define element, whether it is an organized program, or a decentralized community.

On occassion, when you get enough mass, some of them will try to write down what these are--the Apache foundation went through this, but so sometimes so do the many community folks who start to write a FAQ--but each group goes through a rediscovery process of these ideas.

My view is that communities grow by their own efforts, not on a very focused path, but evolve over time and stabilize at a certain point. Some of the really successful ones actually start off because they are not something else (as in not the mainstream), which often predicates that they do not look into how other communities form. By trying to break into a new direction, they tend to leave all other ideas behind.

The other part is that a truly decentralized community tends to follow leadership (another hard to define quality), and not only does this change over time, but not all our leaders know how to organize a loose network of people such as a community. Without this kind of understanding, it becomes a harder process of successes and failures, and rediscovery of the same ideas.

As part of a personal project, I've started learning JSPs and Servlets. My first thought was to go into Rational Software Architect and start modeling out what I had in mind. Without really looking into it I went into standard class modeling. Then downloaded Tomcat to start work on the actual JSPs, and which then led me to download Eclipse 3.2--I don't know why I didn't think of checking into how I could build JSPs with RSA, but I think it was to be able to get something that the students can use. This is a project for the students but I realized later through our Academic Initiative (when you sign up), they can get a copy of RSA for student development projects anyway; (or the 30-day eval off our site)

This probably sounds like a commercial but, to make it short, the Eclipse basic tooling to create JSPs in a Dynamic Web project is pretty simplistic; enough to get you an editor and get working. The visual modeling in RSA is just so much easier to use (supplemented by the text editor for the scripts) for planning and layout. The relevant HTML tags, JSP elements, and even JSF (which I haven't used yet) is there too. Now, I just need a whole lot of practice.

Two other ideas from The Starfish and the Spider (see earlier post; book list) as the foundation of peer-developed community are: circles and pre-existing network.

The concept of a circle stems from how most peer groups (small social network) start: with a small group of folks. This is the very old idea of clans, tribes and even villages. Jared Diamond's excellent book Guns, Germs and Steel, describes how these groups originated in primitive human societies. The fact is that this is still the way many communities start, but of course, with a different purpose than survival. The small group allows the members to get to know each other on a more personal level, become familiar with their interests, and what they want to work on together. This relationship building on a one-on-one basis in a small circle greatly improves the bonds between members and allows that social network to exist.

Per my previous scale, a social network exists when the members know each other and have a vague or a definite idea of why they want to meet, but do not formalize the group with an identity. This means that the group in a social network tends to fall apart as enough people leave, since it only exists based on the individual relationships between the people; once those relationships are broken, the group breaks apart entirely. A community however, has an identity separate of the individual relationships, so the chances are that it can exist without the original members as long as there are enough people who know how to carry on the community.

The value of the small circle is the relatively tight bonds that exist (or the circle just wouldn't last very long). As more members join in, they look to the original circle for guidance and leadership. This is a basis for a stronger community. Having such circles makes it possible to build a community from ground up. There are some prerequisites, many of which are obvious when it comes in-person circles, but harder to implement in virtual circles:

regular meeting times

easy ways to communicate directly with other members one-on-one

easy ways to communicate directly with others as a group

understanding nuances, facial expressions, body expressions, etc.

By having these prereqs, the circle is able to stabilize around what each member may know about the others, and thereby the basis for building relationships. Obvioulsy, you still need the other elements like Catalysts, Champions, Ideology, etc. but those either initiate the group (catalyst) or emerge from the group (champions, ideology).

This may be the basis for a circle/small social network, but it is still different from large social networks and communities.

It's interesting to see the evolution of reward mechanisms in MMORPGs. In multiplayer situations, it is often difficult to tell who completes a task when there are a number of steps involved. For example, in a raid on WoW against a single monster, who gets recognition for the kill when it takes 40-80 people working as a team to kill that beast? It's defined now in WoW but this same problem existed all the way back to the days of text MUDs.

In the first generation, essentially there was no thought involved in this. Whoever made the killing blow got the points for the kill. Very primitive and the cause of many an argument. The next few improvements--it came in several different ways--was to add a list on the create being attacked where it kept track of who the attackers were and distribute the points based on how many points of damage each person made on the creature, so the distribution of experience points for the kill was more even. WoW provides a newer version of this whereby each person engaged in the raid gets dollars per kill, which once the creature was dead, they could spend to buy the reward items.

However, this still raises a problem when there are items that several people want to share from the common pool of rewards. In the people-administrative way, the guild--there's usually a guild involved--makes a decision on who gets what. This is where it breaks down again: what happens when there is an item so unique that the top contendors or leaders will argue for it. As my friend Eric described, that is the death knell of many a guild.

If you think this is a situation limited to MMORPGs and games, you're mistaken. This same situation exists when you have a community that is working for a shared goal, and there is some reward that needs to be distributed across the membership. In team scenarios in corporate environment, that is not very different than negotiations for annual bonuses. The differentiating factor is that in MMORPGs as in other communities, the group of people are not part of a single formal organization with defined managers and advocates. Instead it is up to each person to argue their own case. In other words, it is even more difficult in communities.

I don't have any answer here, but it is important to recognize that the situations are similar here, and compare what methods of distribution or approaches people take.